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These releases (4.1.3 for Confluence 3.3 and 4.0.4 for Confluence 3.1 - 3.2.1) introduce an update to the administration pages. A much cleaner look and feel, and massive speed and browser compatibility improvements to the Manage Spaces and Link Aliases tables.

See Theme Administration Changes for more details.

The Builder 4.1.1 release is now available for download. This release fixes a bug with viewing the manage layouts and builder admin interface in Confluence 3.3.

This release can be installed via the plugin repository, or downloaded directly from the downloads page.

Builder 3.3.6 has been released and is available here: Downloads

More information can be found on the Builder 3.3.6 release notes paqe.

We've been making lots of enhancements to the flags feature in Theme Builder 3.3.6 and 3.4.0, however there's been little documentation done on this...

As a start we've created a page called Working with Flags and we'd like your feedback on it. If you've wanted to know more about flags, take a look at that page and post comments regarding anything that's missing or that you find confusing.

We're hoping to get all the flags documentation completed for the launch of Builder 3.3.6 which has more flag-aware macros and a new 'notflag' parameter on them (that does opposite of the flag param).

Builder is now free for use on any confluence install from 2.7 onwards.

Why free

In order for us to concentrate more on our level of service, and provide a more effective solution to our clients we have decided to make builder a free plugin, it remains commercially supported, and our plans for it's future have not changed signficantly.

We will still be developing the clustered plugin resources module, zipped layout backups (including resource files), removing ext and all it's painfulness, and providing a layout library that allows sharing of layout designs (we may even consider developing a marketplace to allow third parties to sell their own builder layouts).

Existing license holders will continue to recieve support and upgrades for the duration of their maintenance contract. At the end of existing mainenance contracts, users may continue maintaining a support contract with us - so that they may continue to use tracker.adaptavist.com and recieve one-to-one support, albeit with a greater level of responsiveness & attention to their issues that the reduced workload will permit.

Alternatively users may continue to enjoy free upgrades, and embrace the builder community through the forums on this site for their support needs.

As anyone who has ever tried customising the page attachments screen will know, it's a nightmare. I decided to take a look to see what could be done to improve the situation...

The problem

The page attachments screen is designed with one theme in mind - the default Confluence theme. It's designed to only work on screen resolutions above 1024x276. As such, if you have a custom theme you'll often end up with this sort of mess (click thumbnail to enlarge):

Nasty! Our website theme is fixed to 980px width and also has a sidebar which consumes more screen real estate. The Confluence attachments screen is not designed to work with this scenario.

One major problem here is that the HTML and CSS for the upload section is shockingly bad - rather than using a simple table for the file upload boxes and comments, Confluence is using two <div> elements - one of which is floated to the left of the screen. The various input elements are then output in a list (why?!!) which causes havoc with a screen reader.

There's not much we can do about the accessibility - Atlassian will have to use decent semantic markup to solve that issue (Tip: use a table!), but we can sort out the display glitches.

The solution

First, we decided to start with the list of existing attachments - by fixing this we'll also fix the output of the {attachments} macro which suffers the same problem.

It turns out that the CSS to repair the macro is pretty trivial:

table.attachments a,
table.attachments td,
table.attachments th {
  font-size: 10px;
  width: auto;
  white-space: normal;
}

A smaller font helps long filenames and comments take less screen space, and the auto width and normal word wrapping allow the browser to automatically size the table more effectively.

Next, we turn to the upload section - this required quite a bit of fiddling and we've not even tested it on MSIE yet:

.atb-body #viewAttachmentsDiv input {
  width: auto;
}
#upload-files {
  width: 70%;
}
#upload-comments {
  width: 27%;
}
#upload-comments .stepdesc {
  display: none;
}

Again, the end result is pretty simple CSS, but it took lots of experimentation to find the most suitable CSS to use. In particular, due to the really bad HTML structure of the uploads section, we had to hide the ".stepdesc" element (a message about comments not exceeding 255 chars) to get the comments boxes further down the list to line up with their upload boxes.

If the upload section used a table, which in this case is far more semantically correct than a bunch of divs and lists, the issues shown earlier probably wouldn't have arisen in the first place.

The result

So, what did our little CSS hacks achieve - let's take a look:

If you're a software developer, don't assume that end-users will be working on full-width layouts on a 30" Apple cinema display. Also, tables are semantically correct in many situations - many web developers seem to be avoiding using tables completely when, in reality, this often results in non-semantic markup for situations like the one described above.

In the wake of the Atlassian Starter programme (which has been a runaway success, exceeding its $25k target in the first day), a number of users have been asking if since $5 is 'basically free' whether they could get a free license for builder/bubbles to go with it.

We at adaptavist love the idea of making a difference in the real world, not just by selling great software but actually making a real contribution to the society we live in.

So as an added bonus for those people using a $5 license we have made some changes to our licensing code making builder run for free on their commercial license. We're hoping this will encourage more small businesses to take advantage of the $5 Confluence licenses, raising yet more money for charity ... let's see if we can make it $50k by the end of the week!

You'll need Theme Builder 3.3.4 (or later) to take advantage of this - we should be releasing a final version of 3.3.4 in the coming days however all releases of builder will run for free for 30 days after the creation of the confluence license anyway (so long as you accept the EULA) ... just remember to upgrade to 3.3.4 once it is released or things will suddenly go pear-shaped on you in a week or two.

Free licenses of our plugins are covered under our community support service level.

You can download Builder 3.3.4-M4 which contains support for the FREE atlassian starter license from here

Builder 3.3.3 has now been released. You can download this release from the Atlassian Marketplace (click on the previous versions link to see all files) or install from the plugin repository.

• Ensure comment forcing is respected
• Avoid redirecting login to logout
• Add confluence 2.10, 2.7, clickr & left-nav sample layouts
• Use StringBuilder in permission checking
• Refactor permission checking
• Restore breadcrumbs content items for admin actions
• Add 'user friendly' licensing warning
• Allow menuitems to use replacements
• work around jQuery issues with confluence 2.8.2 edit screens
• fix webui icons
• allow pagetree2 to deal with missing space home pages
• fix 'online documentation' links
• dont encode page titles for Office Connector
• add Browse Space menulink
• make url aliases work with page names
• allow builder 3.x to behave similarly to 2.x with @SPACEKEY@ layout defaulting
• Ensure clearing layout latch results in cleared layout not latched layout
• Fix page=SPACEKEY:pagename context check
• Generate 2.10 specific default dashboard code
• Add layout manager menulink to default layout
• Make manage-layouts only accessible to space-admin & site admin
• Fix sidebar visibility & resultant layout issues on Opera
• Move navigation panel to upper section
• Allow builder-show/hide to switch based on space type (global/personal)
• Add builder version action
• Ensure internal css & js files are cached correctly by java
• Make the doctype editable
• Add icon=noicon to logo in default layout
• Avoid retrieving parent space when no parent spacekey found
• Ensure aliases backup can be downloaded on its own
• Ensure body classes pull their data from builderData and do not rely on velocity
• Add decorator body class
• Disable builder-debug macro by default
• Ensure correct path is used to opensearch metadata
• Avoid case issues when checking webui links
• Add sorting to pagetree2
• Sort plugins by name in menulink aliases interface
• Avoid NPE in breadcrumbs when viewing historical pages in confluence 2.7
• Avoid IE comments corruption in confluence 2.10
• Add 'globallabels' menulink
• Store comments state in both the ActionContext as well ass HttpSession
• Update icon and menulink html to improve compliance with w3c validator
• Remove firebug lite
• Ensure personal space logos can fall back to profile pic
• Dont include labels-javascript for 2.10
• Ignore invalid content properties when looking for metadata2 parent spaces

The Builder 3.3.3 Release Candiate is now available from the Early Access Programme page.

This release contains the folllowing changes from builder 3.3.2:

• Ensure comment forcing is respected
• Avoid redirecting login to logout
• Add confluence 2.10, 2.7, clickr & left-nav sample layouts
• Use StringBuilder in permission checking
• Refactor permission checking
• Restore breadcrumbs content items for admin actions
• Add 'user friendly' licensing warning
• Allow menuitems to use replacements
• work around jQuery issues with confluence 2.8.2 edit screens
• fix webui icons
• allow pagetree2 to deal with missing space home pages
• fix 'online documentation' links
• dont encode page titles for Office Connector
• add Browse Space menulink
• make url aliases work with page names
• allow builder 3.x to behave similarly to 2.x with @SPACEKEY@ layout defaulting
• Ensure clearing layout latch results in cleared layout not latched layout
• Fix page=SPACEKEY:pagename context check
• Generate 2.10 specific default dashboard code
• Add layout manager menulink to default layout
• Make manage-layouts only accessible to space-admin & site admin
• Fix sidebar visibility & resultant layout issues on Opera
• Move navigation panel to upper section
• Allow builder-show/hide to switch based on space type (global/personal)
• Add builder version action
• Ensure internal css & js files are cached correctly by java
• Make the doctype editable
• Add icon=noicon to logo in default layout
• Avoid retrieving parent space when no parent spacekey found
• Ensure aliases backup can be downloaded on its own
• Ensure body classes pull their data from builderData and do not rely on velocity
• Add decorator body class
• Disable builder-debug macro by default
• Ensure correct path is used to opensearch metadata
• Avoid case issues when checking webui links
• Add sorting to pagetree2
• Sort plugins by name in menulink aliases interface
• Avoid NPE in breadcrumbs when viewing historical pages in confluence 2.7
• Avoid IE comments corruption in confluence 2.10
• Add 'globallabels' menulink
• Store comments state in both the ActionContext as well ass HttpSession
• Update icon and menulink html to improve compliance with w3c validator
• Remove firebug lite

Builder 3.3.2 has been released and is available from the Downloads page, or the plugin repository

This release includes

• Avoid errors when retrieving web-item icons in confluence 2.7
• Add support for metadata 2 nested spaces
• Strip tags in blog rss feeds
• Optimise permission caching
• Fix automated alias creation
• Ensure lists are styled correctly in confluence 2.9
• Add @childless check to builder-show/hide
• Fix use-layout macro on pages
• Allow with-pages macros to render multiple items
• Allow webui-list to generate lists with separators rather than sub-lists
• Avoid creating unnessecary space in title area default theme

Builder 3.3.1 has been released and is available from the Downloads page, or the plugin repository

This release includes

• Fixes to the labels and comments code to ensure they work correctly with confluence 2.7 & 2.8
• Ensure that all atlassian resources are included in confluence 2.8 & 2.9
• Allow users to define their own menulink replacements
• Allow builder-show/hide by IP address
• Allow rss feeds to be included in the HTML header section through use of the {blog-rss-feed} macro
• Avoid linking breadcrumbs that do not have a target (eg blog year)
• Update {list-spaces} to be more efficient
• Fix notation guide for blog macros
• Allow alias data to be exported and imported with settings backups
• Upgrade to firebug lite 1.2.1
• Fixes for {webui-list} macro
• Ensure default layouts are used when DEFAULT layout selected.
• Workaround spacekeys not being set on historical content
• Ensure wikimenu strips syle tags
• Consolidate noicon functionality
• Fix toggleVisibility/toggleSidebar menulinks
• Update menuitem notataion guide
• Ensure DWR is included for pagetree2 in 2.7
• Ensure use-layout clears cached data
• Ensure search results pages in confluence 2.9 are correctly themed
• Fix loopback url for watching spaces
• Ensure default layout returned when no layout specified
• Avoid JS & CSS tab popups overwriting each other

Builder 3.3.1 RC has been released and is available from the Early Access Programme page.

This release includes

• Fixes to the labels and comments code to ensure they work correctly with confluence 2.7 & 2.8
• Ensure that all atlassian resources are included in confluence 2.8 & 2.9
• Allow users to define their own menulink replacements
• Allow builder-show/hide by IP address
• Allow rss feeds to be included in the HTML header section through use of the {blog-rss-feed} macro
• Avoid linking breadcrumbs that do not have a target (eg blog year)
• Update {list-spaces} to be more efficient
• Fix notation guide for blog macros
• Allow alias data to be exported and imported with settings backups
• Upgrade to firebug lite 1.2.1
• Fixes for {webui-list} macro
• Ensure default layouts are used when DEFAULT layout selected.
• Workaround spacekeys not being set on historical content
• Ensure wikimenu strips syle tags
• Consolidate noicon functionality
• Fix toggleVisibility/toggleSidebar menulinks
• Update menuitem notataion guide

After some digging about for a solution, both on our side as well as atlassian, the solution to the problem of exporting menuicons to pdf and word files has been found ... well almost!

Please vote for these two issues, so that we can generate a more useful PDF & Word output: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6919 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6246

We've finally sorted out our license key generator and the keys are now being sent out. If you do not receive your license key in the next few days, please let us know.

Some notes on Confluence 2.8...

Confluence 2.8 has been released and now has much better separation of content and design, making it easier than ever to customise pages within Confluence using Theme Builder's "Custom CSS" options.

Theme Builder 3.0.2 (current stable release) will not work with Confluence 2.8 due to some API changes within Confluence, however Theme Builder 3.0.3 should be out fairly soon.

Any customers who have upgraded their production environments to Confluence 2.8 before testing in a staging environment should contact Adaptavist Support to get a snapshot release of Theme Builder 3.0.3 which will get you up and running, albeit with ugly breadcrumbs.

Adaptavist strongly recommend that customers try all upgrades of Confluence and any plugins in a staging environment before rolling out to a production environment. We've seen a steady increase in the number of customers upgrading the production instances of their mission-critical wikis without doing any testing beforehand - it's not a good way to upgrade your wiki!

Atlassian now provide free Developer or Test licenses for staging environments and Theme Builder will automatically run in "Free Mode" on such installations to encourage customers to test upgrades before releasing them to end-users

It should be noted that we've had a growing number of reports that Confluence 2.8.0 is using quite a bit more RAM and server resources than earlier versions. Our initial tests of the final release are also showing similar issues and we will continue to investigate and provide feedback to Atlassian.

We would advise customers who are not desperate to upgrade to Confluence 2.8.0 to wait for Confluence 2.8.1 before upgrading – let the early adopters find any new bugs and wait for the 2.8.1 bug fix release (always good practice in mission-critical environments).